My husband and I were visiting Red Deer. We lived in Red Deer for 18 years and had always considered it our home.
So every time we find time we usually drive to Red Deer to visits our longtime friends to touch base and to know the latest news about who got wed, new babies, and sometimes we get sad news about people we have known to have passed on.
What caught my eye this time is the news about the two languages emerging as the two languages having a lot more people speaking them.
I am as usual that Canadians are still calling my language as “Tagalog” instead of the politically and appropriately correct “Pilipino.”
In 1898, after a long struggle to gain our independence from Spain, a new group of colonials have arrive in our shores to claim our country and Cuba from Spain as in accordance with Treaty of Versailles 1898.
Nothing was told about us. Filipinos were again on the path of revolution from these new people.
In 1938, the Filipinos have asked the American government to give a chance to established a republic. And the Americans had agreed.
They gave us 10 years to show them that we can rule our government and after the 10 years, we will be given our hard-earned independence.
A constitution had been drafted, a president had been elected, a flag, a language had been chosen and everything else needed to become a republic.
The newly elected president is a Spanish-speaking individual whose command of the Tagalog dialect was horrendous but because he comes from the Tagalog region he named it as our national language. It was carried out in the legislature because at that time the most elite members of the Manila’s 400 were composed of mostly Spanish-speaking families. And the Tagalog dialect is only one of the 88 dialects to choose from.
It is almost 98 per cent Spanish words and can usually be understood by other Filipinos.
The other dialect has less Spanish words in them. So Tagalog was chosen as our national language.
The commonwealth government was still in infancy when the second world war erupted.
The Americans made good of their promise so after the war on July 4, 1948, our flag was again raised to declare our independence.
For years after that, we were celebrating our independence.
Not very many Filipinos were happy about it. Sometime in the 1960s, Filipino lawmakers decided to change our independence day.
The first time we raised our flag and declared ourselves free from any colonial rule was June 12, 1898. That was the day we really had fought hard and had tore the “cedulas,” that was an identification card issued by the Spanish to all Filipinos stating that we Filipinos are owned by the Spanish. June 12, 1898, was again named as our true independence day.
Coming after that our constitution was again changed, the wordings, the phrases used and everything else was changed including the name of our language.
We will be known as country: Philippines, people: Filipinos, language: Pilipino.
I hope next time everyone will remember that the Philippine national language is called Pilipino and not Tagalog.
Sincerely yours,
Rosalinda Baria-Coppard
Cultural and diversity trainer
Fort McMurray